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Teenage Boys Really Do Eat A Lot

Jim Liebelt

Jim is Senior Writer, Editor and Researcher for the HomeWord Center for Youth and Family at Azusa Pacific University. Jim has over 25 years of experience as a youth and family ministry specialist, and has been on the HomeWord staff since 1998. He has served over the years as a pastor, author, youth ministry trainer, adjunct college instructor and speaker. Jim’s culture blog and parenting articles appear on HomeWord.com. Jim is a contributing author of culture and parenting articles to Crosswalk.com. Jim and his wife Jenny live in Olympia, WA.

2010Jun 16

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In a lunch-buffet experiment involving 200 kids ages 8 to 17,
researchers found that boys routinely ate more compared with girls their
own age. But boys in their mid-teens were the most ravenous of all --
downing an average of nearly 2,000 lunchtime calories.

The pattern
makes sense, given that boys usually hit their growth spurt -- putting
on height and muscle mass -- in late puberty, according to senior
researcher Dr. Jack A. Yanovski, of the U.S. National Institute of Child
Health and Human Development.

Yet, while teenage boys have a
storied reputation for packing it away, there had actually been little
objective evidence that this is the norm.

"There's a lot of folk
wisdom that says boys can eat prodigious amounts, but we haven't had
much data," Yanovski told Reuters Health.

To fill the gap, he and
his colleagues had 204 8- to 17-year-old boys and girls come to a lunch
buffet on two separate days. On one day, the kids were instructed to eat
as much as they normally would during lunch; on the other day, they
were told to eat as much as they wanted.

Overall, the researchers
found, boys ate more than girls did at each stage of puberty.
Prepubescent boys -- generally between the ages of 8 and 10 -- averaged
nearly 1,300 lunchtime calories, versus 900 among prepubescent girls.

Girls
showed the biggest increase in appetite during early- to mid-puberty,
roughly between the ages of 10 and 13. Girls that age averaged almost
1,300 lunchtime calories, and that figure was only slightly higher among
girls who were in late puberty.

Boys, on the other hand, tend to
develop later. And their calorie needs appear to shoot up significantly
in late puberty, or between the ages of 14 and 17.

While boys in
this study showed little change in calorie intake between pre- and
mid-puberty, their average lunchtime calorie intake reached nearly 2,000
calories in late puberty. And as long as their teenage sons are healthy
and normal-weight, a sudden surge in eating should not be alarming,
according to the researcher.